3841

So where is the Multiplayer? I can smell you can do coop in this thing, but only if you have friends. People like me that don’t have any friends can play multiplayer in this thing?

3842

Dude, I love you but your Diablo posts are becoming nonsensical.

You can add friends via the box in the lower right corner of the game using your friend’s RealID or BattleID

3843

You seriously need to read what you just typed before hitting “submit reply”.

Sheesh.

3844

Maybe for you. For those who want to get value out of our money, not so much. I remember downloading a kitted out character once… you’re right, it was boring. I went back to building my own and getting my own drops, because that was more fun. But I liked occasionally being able to just download super-rare kitted characters that played differently. I remember one with some exploding crossbow and all sorts of + fire damage as a sorceress. It was different and good for a few hours of fun. Only in extremist world is disabling a 10KB download equaling a few hours of fun in a game “justified”.

I will say I played some D3 last night and was a bit underwhelmed by the wizard. Then I was upset when I couldn’t log in today, and have been playing for the last hour. It doesn’t feel like DII which is upsetting since I really, really enjoyed D2 and no other crawler has really reproduced a similar feel. But it does feel perfectly solid and good and I have little doubt it will be worth $60.

So having both denigrated and lauded the game, can someone explain the rune thing to me? I thought they were going to be upgradable and act like gems used to. (I liked the gem collection game!) But they don’t seem to be set up that way. Did that change at soe point? Did I miss something? Is there -any- part of building your character that has long term ramifications any longer? (I miss it, yes. I’m not claiming Diablo is teh sux because it’s gone, but I thought there were some secondary/tertiary things that had that long, slow, power-climb type of setup to it.)

Also while we’re at it… does anything beyond simple magic weapons exist in the demo. My wizard is level 10 and I’ve not seen anything other than purple weapons. I’ve got three teeth from crafting so that means I’ve gone through three rare weapons I think, but I can’t for the life of me tell anyone what made them rare or how I could have told they were rare.

3845

Seriously, you think that the better approach is to make users log-in again and again? It’s not like Blizzard has no experience in handling server loads and queues.

3846

Runes are no longer actual items. You get access to them as you level, and they let you modify your abilities in various ways. You do get access to the first rune in the demo, unless they changed it recently.

Item quality is largely determined by the number of affixes. Magic (blue) items have up to 2, rare (yellow) have more than 2, and legendary (orange) items are kinda like uniques in D2 but they have some set and some randomly generated attributes, so legendaries of the same name can vary in quality also. Set (green) items are like legendaries that also give a bonus when you wear multiple pieces of the same set.

There are no purple items, although the shade of blue looks kinda purpley.

3847

I’m really annoyed that equipping an 11dps bow somehow increases my wizard’s spell damage. I know we’ve been over this upstream, but playing last night and this morning and observing this first-hand. . .ugh. The entire game’s perspective is staring down at the toon you’re building, and watching a wizard running through a dungeon with a bow equipped because I have to use it or else I’ll spend more time backpedalling because it quadruples my current dps breaks immersion like a mofo for me. And I sure would be tempted at various stages of progression through the game to hop onto that AH and just buy a wand if I haven’t seen one drop in levels that’s better than that axe or bow or dagger I’m currently using.

3848

Mechanically it’s a great idea for scaling purposes (finally a RPG which just might avoid the weapon vs spell scaling issues!) but I could see it being pretty weird aesthetically… I’m guessing, anyway, since I still haven’t been able to successfully log in. :)

3849

Perhaps Teiman means random interaction/open queues/random games? I have no idea how Bnet2.0 is working in D3, but in Starcraft, it actively goes out of its way to prevent enjoyable socialization. No permanent chat channels, no automatic chat channels, and friending requires getting either the person’s email or hidden character code. . . and since a common messanger status lets you chat at someone without them being able to reply to you, it’s totally possible for someone you had a good game with to ask you to friend them and never get your affirmative messages containing your char code.

Bnet1.0 was disorganized, overrun with spammers, and entirely user driven. It was also leagues better, more interactive, and more enjoyable to use than Bnet2.0 :/

Again, no idea how similar/dissimilar D3 is in this regard. But if you don’t know people in RL who are playing, I can’t help but guess it might be hard to meet people in-game.

3850

No, no, no. See thats old skool and just busted. The new hotness is getting achievements to become a 'chiev whore and brag to your buddies on facebook via autoupdate that at 3am you killed 20 monsters via chandelier, walls etc. in one mighty blow. That and now blizz and facebook can make more money selling your facebook data to advertisers along with their cut of the “real” money auction house.

3851

Just for the few people who, apparantly, don’t know this:

control c, control v works fine, at least in my case it does. Doing control v 20-50 times is still annoying, but a lot better then typing the whole damn password again and again…

3852

Well, there are publicly open games (not many right now, I think that part of the server isn’t fully integrated yet or something), or you can open your own game publicly from main menu.

The friends list also shows people you have recently played with and whether or not they’re online, so it’s pretty easy to friend someone you met in a public game, or ignore them entirely.

There is an “Invite to Group” option is for in friends, from what I can tell right now it’s an easy way for friends to stay together to start a new game, but stay together if the game quits or if they decide to re-run a quest. Being able to select what part of a quest the game starts on is a pretty damn nice feature, either if you want to start somewhere earlier for someone who hasn’t done the quest, or if you want to do a loot re-run of a boss fight or something.

A good side-effect of being always connected is that there are no hosts, so if your friend’s internet gives out the game does not end like it did on closed Battle.net in D2 (don’t remember if that happened on the official battle.net though).

3853

I managed to play for a couple hours. It’s really, really polished and very impressive graphically BUT I find it lacking “soul” and the new skills system isn’t really clicking for me so far. Also, WTF was that “pay 10k gold to increase your stash space”? Why do they feel the need to monetise everything …

FWIW, I thought the butcher encounter in D1 was brilliant gameplay (fresh meat! still remember running like crazy when a friend when playing co-op and having a brilliant time because of it), D2 had a few similar moments (but not really) and the demo of D3 feels even blander.

I know it’s a demo, the final game may be completely different and I will pre-order the game anyway. Just sharing my opinion :)

3854

This must be what Raph Koster meant when he called single-player a historical anomaly.

3855

To open your game to allow anyone to join, you have to start a game then hit esc to bring up the menu and click “open game to public”. I’m not sure if there is an option to always have it on

3856

I just played through last night with a friend and it was pretty sweet and we had no issues logging in or with lag and we both played fresh characters all the way through to the skeleton king.

Sorry to hear some people are having issues, but we had zero for a good three hours of playing.

3857

Dude, what the hell are you talking about? That’s in-game gold that you get from just playing, and from the way gold drops ramp up from 1-2 gold to 20-30 gold just from levels 1-10, it really won’t take long to open up that stash.

Diablo 2 had the same system, pay gold to open up more stash slots.

3858

No it didn’t, the expansion increased it.

Also to the people having lag, did you try changing the server you are connecting to? Since the open beta they added 2 more servers.

3859

I think you’re thinking of Titan Quest Pogo.

3860

I don’t remember whether D2 had that or not, but the gold is indeed in-game gold. And I ended the beta with well over 10k in gold, so I doubt it’s much of a problem.